Ex-Financial Times Journalist Tom Foremski @ the Collision of Technology and Media

I'm a big fan of Gabe Rivera's Techmeme news aggregator, (and I'm not the only one as my photo shows), I became even more of an admirer when he hired five editors to help with story placement, because news sites stopped linking to each other, and his usual search algorithm didn't work anymore (Google take note).

Earlier today, Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, reported that one of its senior execs, Sean Maloney, number two at Intel, suffered a major stroke.

I wrote about it around 4pm. Others have too. Nine hours later, nothing has shown up on Techmeme. Top story at this time (10pm Monday) on Techmeme is an old story: Picnik Acquired by Google. The most recent Sean Maloney story is Intel Risks It All (Again) Oct 14, 2009.

I speak as a fan, Gabe, fix that algorithm :)

UPDATED: A story finally appeared on Techmeme at 6.55am Eastern Time the next day - linked to a Guardian story in the UK - NOT to the source statement from Intel the previous day.

"Death might be too strong a word but this is definitely a watershed moment. Techmeme, which used to rely completely on Gabe Rivera's secret algorithm to pick tech news and blog posts, now has six editors.

This is significant because Techmeme shows that human aided algorithms are more effective than just software and server. Techmeme is a microcosm of the rest of the search-enabled world of services, from news aggregators to basic search.

If Techmeme can't be Techmeme just by using its algorithms, and now needs lots of editors, then that means much larger news aggregators and search companies will likely have to add human editors too."

"Looking at Techmeme today, there are many stories that have no links to them at all, or they are links from within their own sites. For example, a story on Sir Martin Sorrell (Sir Martin Sorrell: Rupert Murdoch's pay wall plan is right) from the Daily Telegraph shows one link, from a Daily Telegraph blog.

The demise of linking seems as if we have gone back to where things stood five years ago, when newspapers hated linking out to other news sites, or even acknowledging that other news sites existed.

Bloggers loved linking and many still do it -- but not as much, especially if they've transitioned into online news magazines such as GigaOm, orReadWriteWeb, blogs only in name because they use blogging software (Wordpress) to publish but act like and look like the traditional old media.

This all has a more serious implication: Google PageRank. The whole bedrock of Google's search is in links. That was its founders' great insight: pages with more links to them are more important than those with fewer links. There is a PageRank patent.

Not everyone has reduced their linking. Spammers and publishers of commerce sites are continuing to use links a lot because that's what Google pays attention to in determining the quality of a page. This means that if non-spammers are linking less then Google's first page of results is going to get flooded by spam."